The Warmth of Other Suns (19 page)

“If that next row is a bad row,” George said, “and you on a bad row, and here’s somebody else by you on a bad row, you lag back, you keep watching them. You let them get through first, ahead of you, so they can get that bad row. Then you hurry up and get through.”

If the next one up was thick with fruit and “you on a bad row, you run through it,” George said. “But you be sure they done moved over before you leave your row. You get cagey. It’s little tricks in all this.”

Some men could pick a hundred boxes a day. They called them high rollers. George never managed more than sixty-five or seventy. He never cared enough about it to get proficient.

They set the ladders in the tree, ladders sixteen and twenty feet high, sometimes spliced like extension cords and leaning forty feet up, a full four stories, along the spine of the tree. They had to set them so the ladder wouldn’t kick when they reached the top and wouldn’t split the tree in two, which was liable to happen with a ladder set in the fork of a young bud. They learned to plant their ladders deep in the soil.

The trees were wet from the rain, and George and the pickers had to balance themselves on the slick limbs of the old seedlings. They disappeared into the branches with a bushel sack on their shoulders and a clipper in their hand and only came down when the sack was full and their shoulders ached and they were sick from the sight of fruit. Tangerines, tangelos, temple oranges, navel oranges, Valencia oranges, seeded grapefruit, seedless grapefruit, red navels, ruby reds, lemons, and kumquats. If he had to pick, which he did, George would rather pick grapefruit because they filled a box quicker. But the packinghouses knew that, too. So they paid less for grapefruit than just about anything else.

Up and down the ladders they went, working top to bottom, snipping fruit and filling boxes. Sometimes they heard a voice cry out way down the grove; a picker had come across a wasp nest and pulled at it instead of an orange. Every now and then, they heard a thud and then a cry. A limb had snapped. Somebody fell out of a tree, broke an arm or leg or neck.

George climbed the high limbs of four or five grown seedlings one morning and was climbing deep into the next. The foreman that day was an old colored man named Deacon John Fashaw. They called him Uncle John. George knew him from Gethsemane Baptist Church. The deacon oversaw the harvest of some of the groves at the Eichelberger Packing Company. He called George out of the tree in the middle of the grove.

“Number fourteen!” he yelled.

Deacon Fashaw presided over his pickers with a suckle from an orange tree. It looked like a switch a mother whipped her children with. He called George over to him with the suckle in his hand.

“Now, number fourteen,” the deacon said, looking up into the limbs at George.

“Yes, sir.”

“Come down here. Bring ya ladder.”

“
Dog, what Uncle John want?
” George said under his breath and then, out loud, “I’ll be there, Uncle John.”

If he didn’t move fast, next thing he’d know, Deacon Fashaw would be there shaking his ladder from under the tree.

“Come down, young man. Come down.”

George climbed down, and Deacon Fashaw swooshed the switch at him. Anybody else, and George would have had him on the ground. But it was Deacon Fashaw, and the men respected his position too much to fight him.

“Now, you bring your ladder back here. I told you to bring your ladder back here.”

George ran back to get the ladder and followed Deacon Fashaw back to the first tree he had picked.

“Now, you see that orange up there in the top of the tree?”

“Yeah, Uncle John.”

“Well, you know they want that orange in New York, and you done left it up there in that tree. And I don’t like it. And Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it. Mr. Eichelberger don’t like it, and I ain’t gon’ have it. Now, you put that ladder back in that tree, and you go right on up there and pick that orange right now.”

Deacon Fashaw stood and watched George position his ladder and climb into the tree for that one orange as the other pickers peered through the branches. It was all part of Uncle John’s plan. “He let you get four or five trees away so you have to drag that back,” George said. “You probably done lost five or six boxes while you doing that. You do that two or three times, you soon get the message that ‘I’m gonna be sure I clean my tree before I leave it.’ I mean clean it.”

They moved from grove to grove in a single day. The flatbed truck rumbled down a highway past the bean fields and the turpentine stills. Midday, they finished one grove and were moving to the next. The truck reached an intersection and swung a hard left. The ladders broke from their lashes and shifted under the men. The loose ladders pushed the men off the open bed of the truck and onto the rough surface of the highway as if they had been shot from a gun.

George felt himself thrown to the gravel. His heels nearly hit his back, and he tried to break the fall with his elbow and knee. Half the workers were on the ground. Some had fallen onto their heads and were lying unconscious. A man named Nathan Bailey was never able to work again. He got two hundred dollars for his injuries after the men petitioned the packing company for help. George got twelve dollars and forty-eight cents for his swollen knee and elbow, which he would remember for as long as he lived; they sent him two payments of six dollars and twenty-four cents each.

Most of the men took it and were grateful. George wasn’t. The work was hard, and now it was dangerous. “You not getting anything to begin with, you know, at the best,” he said.

George had some schooling, and the old men who teased him for it put their pride in their sack when they thought the packinghouse was cheating them.

“Schoolboy, look a here,” a man said. “Tell me how much I got for my work. Here my envelope.”

George took it and looked at it and turned to the man. “How many boxes of oranges did you pick?” George asked. “How many boxes of tangerines did you pick? How many boxes of grapefruit?”

The man told him what he thought he had picked, and George did the math.

“No, you three dollars short. They done cheated you out of three dollars somewhere ’cause if you picked the number of boxes you say you picked, you didn’t get paid for all of it.”

Two or three days’ pay had disappeared. It was hard to keep up. Each kind of fruit paid a different rate—four cents a box for grapefruit one day, ten cents a box for tangerines the next, six cents a box for oranges. If they didn’t know how much they picked of each kind of fruit or lost the little ticket that said what they had picked or if the foreman added the numbers on the ticket wrong, whether on purpose or by accident, the pickers didn’t get what little they were due.

“Sometimes they would tell you that they paying one thing and when you get your pay, you got less,” George said. “And if you couldn’t figure, you didn’t know the difference. They were very good at that. They promise you four cents for a box of grapefruit, and you get two cents.”

The pickers took whatever they got. Some asked about the difference but didn’t dare press it. Some wrote it off, blamed themselves, said they must have been the ones who’d lost their ticket. There was no point in protesting. There wasn’t enough work as it was. It was the Depression. And for every man waiting at the corner of Bates and Palmetto in the black wet morning at picking time, hoping to board a truck to the groves, there were ten more out there hoping he would miss it.

MONROE, LOUISIANA, 1935
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

PERSHING WAS SIXTEEN
and making his first trip out of Monroe on his own on a bus ticket his brother Madison had given him for graduation. Pershing had just finished the eleventh grade, which was as far as you could go if you were colored in Louisiana, and he was beside himself with anticipation.

The sign on the front of the bus said
ST. LOUIS
and Pershing climbed on board with his suitcase in his hand and his back propped straight as if he were stepping onto the
Queen Mary
and going to France. He dusted the folds of his tweed suit and headed down the central aisle of the bus in search of a seat. The bus was not going to take him to the Big North of southern dreams but to a modest city in a border state where his brother was serving out his medical residency, and well enough out of the South.

He scanned the aisle to find a place for himself. His eye caught the wooden shingle with the metal prongs on the bottom, the shingle that said
COLORED
on one side and
WHITE
on the other. It was set into holes at the top of a seat back toward the latter half of the bus. He didn’t like seeing it, but he knew to expect it. He took a seat behind the wooden shingle and looked out the window at the view.

Those white and colored shingles were as much a part of the southern landscape as cotton growing in the field. Each state and city had a different requirement or custom to signal how the races were to be separated and to what extent the races were to be divided. In North Carolina, white and colored passengers could not occupy “contiguous seats on the same bench.”
⁸⁶
Virginia prohibited the two races from sitting side by side on the same bench unless all other seats were filled. Several states required that the placard saying
WHITE
or
COLORED
be “in plain letters, not less than two inches high.” In Houston, the race to which the seat belonged was posted on the back of the seat. In Georgia, the penalty for willfully riding in the wrong seat was a fine of a thousand dollars or six months in prison. Colored passengers were assigned to the front of the railcar on the train but to the rear of other conveyances to, in the words of the mayor of Birmingham, do “away with the disagreeable odors that would necessarily follow the breezes.”

The bus headed north along the Mississippi River into Arkansas, picking up more people at stops along the way. The seats began to fill. More white passengers than colored seemed to be boarding. They had taken up some of the seats in the very front and were spreading further back. Now, each time new white people got on, they picked up the wooden shingle and inserted it in the seat back where Pershing was sitting. It seemed only the white people could touch the shingle and set the musical chairs in motion.

“
Go ’head, boy. Move on back
,” the driver told him.

Pershing rustled himself up from the seat he was in. Gathered his things. Looked for an empty space behind him. Moved back a row. Sometimes the new passenger took up a whole row by himself, forcing Pershing back just so the newcomer wouldn’t have to sit next to anyone else.

At every stop, they had to move again until the colored passengers were now crowded into a few seats in the back and Pershing found himself in the very last row.

It was early summer, and road dust flew into the windows and rushed to the back seat, where Pershing in his brand-new tweed suit was pressed among the other colored passengers.

The dust coated the tweed and his skin and his hair, and Pershing found it unbearable, packed as he was like livestock.

“I was dressed as good as I could be,” Pershing said years later. “And I felt very down that I had to submit to this.”

He looked around him at the other colored passengers to his left and to his right, grown people, beaten down, hunched in their seats. They dropped their eyes, and he dropped his.

“Some have endured, and that’s all they’ve known,” Pershing said. “They don’t expect anything better, and nobody’s demanding anything better. You wouldn’t have survived if you had done too much demanding anyway.”

It was a long ride, there was no toilet on the bus, and the back seats took every bump on the road. Before Pershing could make it to St. Louis, he passed his urine and sat in his soaked tweed pants and felt lower than he had in his entire short life.

St. Louis was a blur. Madison carted Pershing all over St. Louis, took him into Homer G. Phillips Hospital, where Madison was a resident and where the nurses fawned over the cute little brother with the thick eyelashes and waves in his hair. Madison reminded him it was time to get ready for college. For a while, when he was thirteen or fourteen, Pershing actually thought he didn’t have to go. He told his mother that one day.